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Acid | The | |||
Tuesday, January 18, 2005 |
Into Ontology's APIs |
source: New England API Aficionado of Medicine
posted: Jan 18, 2005, 1:01 PM by: djs |
We are the results of early human cloning gone awry.
We are the abandoned children of the super-rich, the super powerful, the people with connections up the wazoo -- the people, frankly, with wazoos up the wazoo. We spent our infancy and youth waiting to die in ways no one had ever died before. Our birth distortions were so massive, complex, and widely varied that not one of us has ANY point in common with any point on any bell-shaped curve of ANYTHING anywhere ever, physically, psychologically, sociologically, anthropologically or electrical engineering-wise. In other words, even with infinity factored out, probability and statistics can not locate us anywhere in their vapid little domain. On top of all that, we have been taught or learned (or maybe it was innate) to be true to ourselves. But no one has ever been these selves before and so there is no road map to their truths. And so the only way we can even begin to figure out who we can be, is to watch everybody else being who we can't, shouldn't and wouldn't wanna be. And to watch the people who've learned to be true to someone else's version of self. And then to be NOT them -- to be anything BUT them. To accomplish this, we watch televised entertainment industry awards ceremonies. As the camera pans around, we try to guess which individuals are sitting there saying somewhere inside, man, this is so fuckin' bogus, how the fuck can I even be sanctioning this with my presence? Occasionally, if we're lucky, we find someone who we all agree must be thinking inside: Man, a good fucking tsunami right now would just sweep this place clean. Then we zoom in and research his life as a possible starting point for our own. Either to move towards or move away from, depending on surface conditions of the world and people. Many candidate selves and not selves are auditioned in this way, thanks to the modern technology which allows everyone to see right to the core of everyone else's life from a distance, but not to the core of their own life from close up. This exciting new technology is called being a fucking moron. But when no candidate selves ever become finalists, let alone first runners up, we realize we have to abandon all approaches that involve thought, despite their seeming internally consistent, and just keep talking so that no one else can start. This is apparently what allows us to breeze into the presidency -- along, apparently, with promising that, if elected, we would use the full force of government to get back at all the women who'd screwed us over when we were just a boy trying to score. Once in the White House, we dream of vultures getting all the carrion they can eat just by virtue of dreaming it, but when we wake up, there are no sleeping vultures -- just awake people -- jingling change around in their cupped hands and pockets, waiting for us to join them. So our first presidential act is to order the Supreme Court to uninstall the human nature package, but they come back claiming that when they tried, their uninstaller seemed to hang in the middle after a warning that their browser would no longer work. We are barely reelected, the next time. The margin of victory is less than a book. But later, the exit polls showed that when people said "book" they really meant "placebo". Which really meant "belief". Belief that, one day, the rich will take out the garbage. That Bo Diddly Studies would be the first academic discipline accepted into the Olympics for competition and medals. That death would be the worst thing that could happen, except for no death. That we'd almost be drunk enough not to notice that we weren't quite drunk enough to go on. But not quite. That the reason we were stuck looking for something to look for in the first place, was simply because all the low-hanging fruit had already been picked by those careerist hacks: Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and Marvin Minsky. And that the only place to make discoveries now, was WAY the fuck out there, in the realm where there are no answers, and where even computation wouldn't go -- even if it could. |